Alfred Extension: Open in language…

As part of my job as product manager at equinux, I frequently tweak strings and messages in our applications. As most of our apps are available in multiple languages, it’s often necessary to check changes in multiple languages, e.g. to ensure that the string isn’t too long.

There are a number of utilities available that make it easier to launch apps in a specific language, however they all usually require a number of extra clicks and typically only work with apps in your Applications folder — making it cumbersome to open development builds that aren’t installed there.

I’m a big fan of the keyboard launcher tool Alfred and was thrilled to see that the developer recently added extension support for Alfred Powerpack users (at just £12 / $19 the Powerpack is a steal – highly recommended).

I’ve written a collection of Alfred extensions (basically shell scripts) that will allow you to quickly open an app in the language of your choice:

Simply type the application name, choose the build of version you want to launch, hit the action key and then type the language. Although this may sound like a lot of steps, in practise it’s very easy and fast:

You can download the extensions here, I hope someone else might find them useful as well. Note that you’ll need the Alfred Powerpack to use extensions (but if you use Alfred on a regular basis, I think it’s worth buying just to support continued development).